Old Mole Variety Hour

The Old Mole burrows down to the roots of the great issues of our time – the struggles of ordinary people for democratic and sustainable ways of life. The Mole goes where corporate media fear to tread, supporting grassroots challenges to top-down authority and giving voice to movements that shake the foundations of an unjust society. The Moles' perspective is democratic, broadly socialist, and feminist. (We count Karl Marx as a friend).

Frann Michel hosts this Bastille day episode, and we hear these segments:

Bill Resnick and Norm Diamond discuss worker-cooperative businesses and their significance for the left. Do they prefigure the democratic production of socialism and empower participants? Or are they fragile small businesses that either become as cutthroat as other capitalist enterprises to survive, or else fail after having distracted their members from more promising mass organizing?

Audio

Bill Resnick talks with Pat O'Herron about climate change and public health. They consider how changing weather patterns, rising oceans, acidification and desertification, as well as pollution, change the conditions for illness and death. They address collapse in both "the natural environment" and human infrastructure. O'Herron does not end on a completely sour note though, and shows how knowledge of these dangers and present afflictions points the way to dealing with them.

A day will come when workers will no longer be slaves to the time clock, claims IWW member Chuck Allen. The original demand for less clock time early in the last century was for the 4-hour day 4 days a week. What we got instead was the 8-hour day. Chuck wrote this piece, read here by Joe Clement, at work ("on the clock"), thus demonstrating that we can find ways to reclaim our time when we are supposed to be working on "someone else's time".

If you want to sing, or hear others sing, about labor and the liberty not to labor, Artichoke Music is hosting an open mic of work songs this Thursday (September 11) at 7:00 pm.

"Organic agriculture can feed the world," says Catherine Badgley who teaches Ecology and the Evolution of Agriculture at the University of Michigan. Here she talks with Old Mole Bill Resnick about the impact of industrial agriculture on our climate and how our food could be produced with a much lighter carbon footprint. You can read a paper by her on this topic here (PDF).

What are the protesting, demonstrating crowds in Ferguson saying? What kind of racism is at work in that town and throughout the US? British journalist Gary Younge of the Guardian talks with the Old Mole's Laurie Mercier about the situation. Photo credit: o.canada.com

What legal recourse do the victims of police misconduct, like the family of Michael Brown, have? Legal Moles Mike Snedeker and Jan Haaken discuss how the legal climate has developed from the time of Reconstruction to the present day, and how court judgments against police departments might affect what police actually do in the streets.

Iven Hale hosts this edition of the Old Mole with a focus on the aftermath of the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Also on the show are pieces on agriculture and climate change and liberation from working on the clock. It's all held together with Iven's interesting choices of music.

To hear the whole show, use the play button below. To hear individual pieces, follow the links. You can become a friend of the Old Mole on Facebook, and we invite you to leave comments on this page below.

Old Moles Bill Resnick and Norm Diamond talk about union organizing by way of a mutual review of Jane McAlevey's book "Raising Expecations, and Raising Hell: my decade fighting for the labor movement". They consider the official and cynical meaning of labor day, but also the stagnation of the labor movement as it's moved away from rank-and-file organizing, direct action, and using workers' power to drive social change.

It's convenient to have the Old Mole audio files available.
Even more useful for some of us would be transcripts of the commentaries (Clayton Morgareidge). Written material allows a person a chance to review, consider, digest and refer to mentioned references & thinkers. The "Well Read Red" commentary from 4 Aug 08 is a good example of a piece I'd like to read at my own pace.